New role for Sharp shooter Sue

SUE Woodward’s role at the Sharp Project couldn’t be more different from the cut-throat corporate world over which she presided at ITV Granada. It’s a place where seedling digital start-up companies will be cosseted in a cheap and cheerful ‘growbag’ environment.

SUE Woodward’s role at the Sharp Project couldn’t be more different from the cut-throat corporate world over which she presided at ITV Granada.

It’s a place where seedling digital start-up companies will be cosseted in a cheap and cheerful ‘growbag’ environment.

These seedling businesses will be able to buy accommodation in cleverly glazed road freight containers for as little as £45-per-week.

But Sue is nothing if not well-qualified for her new role.

The former Granada managing director may have once had to chase ratings but her impressive CV also covers being creative director for the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002, a role which helped her win an OBE.

She was also instrumental in Liverpool winning Capital of Culture status in 2008.

Based within the same sprawling distribution warehouse which electronics giant Sharp vacated at the end of 2006, the Sharp Project is still very much a work in progress on the day when Mrs Woodward – now director of the New East Manchester Sharp Project – shows me around.

The Thorp Road, Newton Heath building was bought by Manchester city council for £6.1m and it was thought at one point that it may become a new joint home for the BBC and ITV Granada in Manchester.

When the BBC announced that it would be moving to Peel Media’s MediaCityUK site at Salford Quays, the city council concluded that it would plough on with the idea of a new base for digital and creative businesses.

“And no,” Mrs Woodward insists, “the Sharp Project isn’t in competition with MediaCityUK – what we do here is complementary to it. People might start their careers and companies here and then take them to Salford once they’re established.”

The council has committed £9.2m in total to the project – including the initial purchase price of the building – while the Northwest Regional Development Agency has earmarked £3.4m so far, with a further £2.9m grant expected to be confirmed next month.

It helps that the Sharp Project is at the heart of the New East Manchester regeneration zone and sits next to the Central Park business park. A Metrolink station will open on the doorstep in the spring of 2011.

Another boon is what Mrs Woodward describes as a ‘big fat data pipe’ which will enable the Sharp Project to be one of the best and fastest connected places in the country when it officially opens in April.

At present it feels very much like a distribution warehouse and still will when it’s finished, although work is being done to spruce it up and create dozens of clinically clean new office spaces.

Delivery doors are being glazed, as is the loading bay itself, which will become an enclosed winter garden.

There will be 62 of those ‘shipping containers’ in total, all of them stacked down the centre of the cavernous warehouse.

The biggest space available to a single tenant is 60,000 sq ft.

A promiment record producer – his CV includes work with Lily Allen, U2 and the Ting Tings no less – is poised to be a tenant, as are an established and well-known producer of digital content and a company which provides computer server space.

Membership passes to an innovative ‘Sharp Campus’ will be sold to people who aren’t even tenants, allowing them to rub shoulders with similarly minded-people.

They will be able to hold meetings on the edge of Sharp Campus, where coffee tables will be available for hire by the hour.

“It isn’t a business lounge,” adds Mrs Woodward, who seems to choose her words from an entirely new lexicon developed in order to emphasise the Sharp Project’s point of difference.

“The Sharp Project is not a media centre, because that sounds like the old world, when it referred to people making television programmes, and this is so much more than that.

“We say that the Sharp Project will be a centre for the manufacture, manipulation and distribution of digital content.

“We will offer very affordable rents and we can do that because the Sharp Project wasn’t built by property developers, it was built by the city council.

“We’ve thrown the rulebook away. If you want to take 30,000 sq ft for two years, you can. A music producer is taking a 10-year lease.

“The policy we use is one of WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get – and our prices will be fixed. If you want to fit pink fluffy carpets, then be my guest.”

The overall headcount at the Sharp Project is expected to be in the region of 565, with companies ranging from one-man bands to major players.

Interest has been shown locally, and as far away as Japan, and Mrs Woodward is confident that she has already filled roughly half the available space, although contracts need to be signed.

Any excess profits after overheads and maintenance are taken care of will be ploughed into projects serving the many schools and colleges which might produce the digital content producers of the future.

“The shareholders are the workers,” Mrs Woodward added.

“We want them to decide how the place should be run. It’s about building a community rather than selling space.”